Re: Improve the docstring of case-fold-search

[Stefan Monnier]

> In the current docstring, the expression "ignore case" is not really
> appropriate because the search will not ignore uppercase characters in
> the search string.  A very short way to tell this would be "*Non-nil if
> searches and matches should ignore lowercase."  But while accurate, this
> is confusing IMO.  Hence the long sentence in this patch, inspired by
> the "Search case" section of Emacs manual.

> Should I apply it?

As written, the doc is wrong.  The magic "pay attention to case if
there's a capital letter" is not done "within case-fold-search" but
within isearch (and maybe a few more places) which then bind
case-fold-search to the appropriate value.
The case-fold-search variable is pretty low-level and applies to
functions like re-search-forward.  Maybe it shouldn't be customizable to
avoid such confusion.


        Stefan


> --- buffer.c.~1.583.~ 2009-07-17 21:12:21.000000000 +0200
> +++ buffer.c  2009-07-22 03:55:26.000000000 +0200
> @@ -5727,7 +5727,9 @@
 
>    DEFVAR_PER_BUFFER ("case-fold-search", &current_buffer->case_fold_search,
>                    Qnil,
> -                  doc: /* *Non-nil if searches and matches should ignore 
> case.  */);
> +                  doc: /* *Non-nil if searches and matches should ignore 
> case.
> +If there is an uppercase character in the search string
> +then the search becomes case sensitive.  */);
 
>    DEFVAR_PER_BUFFER ("fill-column", &current_buffer->fill_column,
>                    make_number (Lisp_Int),



> -- 
>  Bastien